hat had
led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks.
The carcasses of houses, and beginnings of new thoroughfares, had
started off upon the line at steam's own speed, and shot away into the
country in a monster train.'

As to the neighbourhood which had hesitated to acknowledge the railroad
in its straggling days, that had grown wise and penitent, as any
Christian might in such a case, and now boasted of its powerful and
prosperous relation. There were railway patterns in its drapers' shops,
and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen. There were railway
hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans,
maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and time-tables;
railway hackney-coach and stands; railway omnibuses, railway streets and
buildings, railway hangers-on and parasites, and flatterers out of all
calculation. There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if
the sun itself had given in. Among the vanquished was the master
chimney-sweeper, whilom incredulous at Staggs's Gardens, who now lived
in a stuccoed house three stories high, and gave himself out, with
golden flourishes upon a varnished board, as contractor for the
cleansing of railway chimneys by machinery.

To and from the heart of this great change, all day and night, throbbing
currents rushed and returned incessantly like its life's blood. Crowds
of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving scores upon
scores of times in every four-and-twenty hours, produced a fermentation
in the place that was always in action. The very houses seemed disposed
to pack up and take trips. Wonderful Members of Parliament, who, little
more than twenty years before, had made themselves merry with the wild
railroad theories of engineers, and given them the liveliest rubs in
cross-examination, went down into the north with their watches in their
hands, and sent on messages before by the electric telegraph, to say
that they were coming. Night and day the conquering engines rumbled at
their distant work, or, advancing smoothly to their journey's end, and
gliding like tame dragons into the allotted corners grooved out to the
inch for their reception, stood bubbling and trembling there, making the
walls quake, as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great
powers yet unsuspected in them, and strong purposes not yet achieved.

But Staggs's Gardens had been cut up root and branch. Oh woe the da